Writer and originator of the controversial Israeli sitcom Arab Labor, Sayed Kashua is an Israeli Palestinian whose novels and media publications relentlessly explore the schizophrenic realities of Palestinian citizens of Israel. This series is the first bi-lingual Hebrew and Arabic show to air on primetime TV and the first to direct the viewing public’s attention to the Israeli Arab experience. This sitcom sits haphazardly on the edge of categorization—neither completely Arab, nor Jewish, Israeli nor Palestinian; hilarious but not completely comedic, and something more than a family sitcom with political content. As in his other novels and short stories, Kashua deliberately plays with the inadequacy of all of these classifications, laying bare the insufficiency that these notions of stable identification breed. Created and produced by an Arab writer, featuring Arab actors and actresses who speak Arabic in the show, this is indeed an Arab Work, but it is one that toys with the instability of that designation. Modelled on American sitcoms, Avoda Aravit has been both praised and savaged in the press and compared to The Cosby Show’s family fun, the wit of Seinfeld and the humorous social commentary of All in the Family. This paper looks closely at the mechanism of satire in the sitcom, investigating the different tactics used to portray a saturated and nuanced view of the Arab Israeli experience; the negotiation of political agency this portrayal entails; and, perhaps most crucially, how the constant shifting between languages, registers and codes both presents and produces a schizophrenic syntax for its viewers to encounter, at once humorous, impossible and hopeful. Like its linguistic collage, Avoda Aravit similarly intermingles different cultural strands of humor into its comedic narratives, importing Jewish and American comicality into its mix of Palestinian-Israeli irony and then subverting the identification of humor with a specific cultural, ethnic or national body. Tracking the various (mis)identities of humor and language at play in the show, this paper investigates the limits and scope of translation between (mis)identifications, inquiring into the potentially generative relations between the performative practices of identity and comedy. At stake is the efficacy of humor in allowing for both the wide circulation of social criticism and the attenuation of its import.